out of the darkness at the end of the room where the windows looked out
upon the valley. This reminded him of his woodland vision of the night
before, and he lay and watched them until they brightened and began to
outline the figures of his still sleeping companions. But there were
faint stirrings elsewhere,--the soft brushing of a squirrel across the
shingled roof, the tiny flutter of invisible wings in the rafters, the
"peep" and "squeak" of baby life below the floor. And then he fell
into a deeper sleep, and awoke only when it was broad day.
The sun was shining upon the empty bunks; his companions were already
up and gone. They had separated as they had come together,--with the
light-hearted irresponsibility of animals,--without regret, and
scarcely reminiscence; bearing, with cheerful philosophy and the
hopefulness of a future unfettered by their past, the final
disappointment of their quest. If they ever met again, they would
laugh and remember; if they did not, they would forget without a sigh.
He hurriedly dressed himself, and went outside to dip his face and
hands in the bucket that stood beside the door; but the clear air, the
dazzling sunshine, and the unexpected prospect half intoxicated him.
The abandoned mill stretched beside him in all the pathos of its
premature decay. The ribs of the water-wheel appeared amid a tangle of
shrubs and driftwood, and were twined with long grasses and straggling
vines; mounds of sawdust and heaps of "brush" had taken upon themselves
a velvety moss where the trickling slime of the vanished river lost
itself in sluggish pools, discolored with the dyes of redwood. But on
the other side of the rocky ledge dropped the whole length of the
valley, alternately bathed in sunshine or hidden in drifts of white and
clinging smoke. The upper end of the long canyon, and the crests of
the ridge above him, were lost in this fleecy cloud, which at times
seemed to overflow the summits and fall in slow leaps like lazy
cataracts down the mountain-side. Only the range before the ledge was
clear; there the green pines seemed to swell onward and upward in long
mounting billows, until at last they broke against the sky.
In the keen stimulus of the hour and the air Key felt the mountaineer's
longing for action, and scarcely noticed that Collinson had
pathetically brought out his pork barrel to scrape together a few
remnants for his last meal. It was not until he had finished his
coffee, and Collinson had brought up his horse, that a slight sense of
shame at his own and his comrades' selfishness embarrassed his parting
with his patient host. He himself was going to Skinner's to plead for
him; he knew that Parker had left the draft,--he had seen it lying in
the bar,--but a new sense of delicacy kept him from alluding to it now.
It was better to leave Collinson with his own peculiar ideas of the
responsibilities of hospitality unchanged. Key shook his hand warmly,
and galloped up the rocky slope. But when he had finally reached the
higher level, and fancied he could even now see the dust raised by his
departing comrades on their two diverging paths, although he knew that
they had already gone their different ways,--perhaps never to meet
again,--his thoughts and his eyes reverted only to the ruined mill
below him and its lonely occupant.
He could see him quite distinctly in that clear air, still standing
before his door. And then he appeared to make a parting gesture with
his hand, and something like snow fluttered in the air above his head.
It was only the torn fragments of Parker's draft, which this homely
gentleman of the Sierras, standing beside his empty pork barrel, had
scattered to the four winds.
CHAPTER II.
Key's attention was presently directed to something more important to
his present purpose. The keen wind which he had faced in mounting the
grade had changed, and was now blowing at his back. His experience of
forest fires had already taught him that this was too often only the
cold air rushing in to fill the vacuum made by the conflagration, and
it needed not his sensation of an acrid smarting in his eyes, and an
unaccountable dryness in the air which he was now facing, to convince
him that the fire was approaching him. It had evidently traveled
faster than he had expected, or had diverged from its course. He was
disappointed, not because it would oblige him to take another route to
Skinner's, as Collinson had suggested, but for a very different reason.
Ever since his vision of the preceding night, he had resolved to
revisit the hollow and discover the mystery. He had kept his purpose a
secret,--partly because he wished to avoid the jesting remarks of his
companions, but particularly because he wished to go alone, from a very
singular impression that although they had witnessed the incident he
had really seen more than they did. To this was also added the
haunting fear he had felt during the night that this mysterious
habitation and its occupants were in the track of the conflagration.
He had not dared to dwell upon it openly on account of Uncle Dick's
evident responsibility for the origin of the fire; he appeased his
conscience with the reflection that the inmates of the dwelling no
doubt had ample warning in time to escape. But still, he and his
companions ought to have stopped to help them, and then--but here he
paused, conscious of another reason he could scarcely voice then, or
even now. Preble Key had not passed the age of romance, but like other
romancists he thought he had evaded it by treating it practically.
Meantime he had reached the fork where the trail diverged to the right,
and he must take that direction if he wished to make a detour of the
burning woods to reach Skinner's. His momentary indecision
communicated itself to his horse, who halted. Recalled to himself, he
looked down mechanically, when his attention was attracted by an
unfamiliar object lying in the dust of the trail. It was a small
slipper--so small that at first he thought it must have belonged to
some child. He dismounted and picked it up. It was worn and shaped to
the foot. It could not have lain there long, for it was not filled nor
discolored by the wind-blown dust of the trail, as all other adjacent
objects were. If it had been dropped by a passing traveler, that
traveler must have passed Collinson's, going or coming, within the last
twelve hours. It was scarcely possible that the shoe could have
dropped from the foot without the wearer's knowing it, and it must have
been dropped in an urgent flight, or it would have been recovered.
Thus practically Key treated his romance. And having done so, he
instantly wheeled his horse and plunged into the road in the direction
of the fire.
But he was surprised after twenty minutes' riding to find that the
course of the fire had evidently changed. It was growing clearer
before him; the dry heat seemed to come more from the right, in the
direction of the detour he should have taken to Skinner's. This seemed
almost providential, and in keeping with his practical treatment of his
romance, as was also the fact that in all probability the fire had not
yet visited the little hollow which he intended to explore. He knew he
was nearing it now; the locality had been strongly impressed upon him
even in the darkness of the previous evening. He had passed the rocky
ledge; his horse's hoofs no longer rang out clearly; slowly and
perceptibly they grew deadened in the springy mosses, and were finally
lost in the netted grasses and tangled vines that indicated the
vicinity of the densely wooded hollow. Here were already some of the
wider spaced vanguards of that wood; but here, too, a peculiar
circumstance struck him. He was already descending the slight
declivity; but the distance, instead of deepening in leafy shadow, was
actually growing lighter. Here were the outskirting sentinels of the
wood--but the wood itself was gone! He spurred his horse through the
tall arch between the opened columns, and pulled up in amazement.
The wood, indeed, was gone, and the whole hollow filled with the
already black and dead stumps of the utterly consumed forest! More
than that, from the indications before him, the catastrophe must have
almost immediately followed his retreat from the hollow on the
preceding night. It was evident that the fire had leaped the
intervening shoulder of the spur in one of the unaccountable, but by no
means rare, phenomena of this kind of disaster. The circling heights
around were yet untouched; only the hollow, and the ledge of rock
against which they had blundered with their horses when they were
seeking the mysterious window in last evening's darkness, were calcined
and destroyed. He dismounted and climbed the ledge, still warm from
the spent fire. A large mass of grayish outcrop had evidently been the
focus of the furnace blast of heat which must have raged for hours in
this spot. He was skirting its crumbling debris when he started
suddenly at a discovery which made everything else fade into utter
insignificance. Before him, in a slight depression formed by a fault
or lapse in the upheaved strata, lay the charred and incinerated
remains of a dwelling-house leveled to the earth! Originally half
hidden by a natural abattis of growing myrtle and ceanothus which
covered this counter-scarp of rock towards the trail, it must have
stood within a hundred feet of them during their halt!
Even in its utter and complete obliteration by the furious furnace
blast that had swept across it, there was still to be seen an
unmistakable ground plan and outline of a four-roomed house. While
everything that was combustible had succumbed to that intense heat,
there was still enough half-fused and warped metal, fractured iron
plate, and twisted and broken bars to indicate the kitchen and tool
shed. Very little had, evidently, been taken away; the house and its
contents were consumed where they stood. With a feeling of horror and
desperation Key at last ventured to disturb two or three of the
blackened heaps that lay before him. But they were only vestiges of
clothing, bedding, and crockery--there was no human trace that he could
detect. Nor was there any suggestion of the original condition and
quality of the house, except its size: whether the ordinary unsightly
cabin of frontier "partners," or some sylvan cottage--there was nothing
left but the usual ignoble and unsavory ruins of burnt-out human
habitation.
And yet its very existence was a mystery. It had been unknown at
Collinson's, its nearest neighbor, and it was presumable that it was
equally unknown at Skinner's. Neither he nor his companions had
detected it in their first journey by day through the hollow, and only
the tell-tale window at night had been a hint of what was even then so
successfully concealed that they could not discover it when they had
blundered against its rock foundation. For concealed it certainly was,
and intentionally so. But for what purpose?
He gave his romance full play for a few minutes with this question.
Some recluse, preferring the absolute simplicity of nature, or perhaps
wearied with the artificialities of society, had secluded himself here
with the company of his only daughter. Proficient as a pathfinder, he
had easily discovered some other way of provisioning his house from the
settlements than by the ordinary trails past Collinson's or Skinner's,
which would have betrayed his vicinity. But recluses are not usually
accompanied by young daughters, whose relations with the world, not
being as antagonistic, would make them uncertain companions. Why not a
wife? His presumption of the extreme youth of the face he had seen at
the window was after all only based upon the slipper he had found. And
if a wife, whose absolute acceptance of such confined seclusion might
be equally uncertain, why not somebody else's wife? Here was a reason
for concealment, and the end of an episode, not unknown even in the
wilderness. And here was the work of the Nemesis who had overtaken
them in their guilty contentment! The story, even to its moral, was
complete. And yet it did not entirely satisfy him, so superior is the
absolutely unknown to the most elaborate theory.
His attention had been once or twice drawn towards the crumbling wall
of outcrop, which during the conflagration must have felt the full
force of the fiery blast that had swept through the hollow and spent
its fury upon it. It bore evidence of the intense heat in cracked
fissures and the crumbling debris that lay at its feet. Key picked up
some of the still warm fragments, and was not surprised that they
easily broke in a gritty, grayish powder in his hands. In spite of his
preoccupation with the human interest, the instinct of the prospector
was still strong upon him, and he almost mechanically put some of the
pieces in his pockets. Then after another careful survey of the
locality for any further record of its vanished tenants, he returned to
his horse. Here he took from his saddle-bags, half listlessly, a
precious phial encased in wood, and, opening it, poured into another
thick glass vessel part of a smoking fluid; he then crumbled some of
the calcined fragments into the glass, and watched the ebullition that
followed with mechanical gravity. When it had almost ceased he drained
off the contents into another glass, which he set down, and then
proceeded to pour some water from his drinking-flask into the ordinary
tin cup which formed part of his culinary traveling-kit. Into this he
put three or four pinches of salt from his provision store. Then
dipping his fingers into the salt and water, he allowed a drop to fall
into the glass. A white cloud instantly gathered in the colorless
fluid, and then fell in a fine film to the bottom of the glass. Key's
eyes concentrated suddenly, the listless look left his face. His
fingers trembled lightly as he again let the salt water fall into the
